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鈥淚 study people on the run,鈥� says AUP Professor Miranda Spieler, a historian of France and its overseas empire whose expertise spans European legal history, human rights, slavery and emancipation. Her first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard, 2012), chronicled the lives of ex-convicts, freed slaves, and non-European immigrants鈥攑eople pushed to the margins of French and colonial society and rendered 鈥渘onpersons鈥� during the 18thand 19th centuries, a time when France was proclaiming the ideals of 濒颈产别谤迟茅.听

But as she probed these histories, Spieler saw that something key was missing: the perspective and everyday lives of the people she studied. In the archives, she says, accessing the voices of oppressed people is always a problem. At best, those voices are 鈥渕ediated by a scribe, an interpreter, a policeman, an interrogator.鈥� All historians of subaltern people, and particularly historians of slavery, confront the 鈥渟piritual and methodological difficulty of grappling with voiceless subjects who are not even named in the sources.鈥澛犅�

Spieler鈥檚 query鈥攈ow to tell the stories of marginalized people on their own terms鈥攕parked a decade-long that culminated in her new book, (Harvard, 2025), recently featured on the podcast.听

She approached the work using two unique methods. The first was to create 鈥渞ich, embedded biographies鈥� of five enslaved people from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean鈥攑eople who have not had "a life in French history before.鈥� In the absence of firsthand records, Spieler drew from France鈥檚 vast institutional archives, including Bastille police files, to do what she calls 鈥済ranular work on neighborhoods鈥�: mapping subjects' physical environment, hiding places, and confidants to create a spatial history.听

One chapter, for example, follows the story of Pauline, a former slave of the governor of the R茅union and Mauritius colonies. Pauline fled to Paris and sought refuge in a building that has since become the Bank of France 鈥攁 juxtaposition of vulnerability and institutional power. 鈥淪laves in Paris become visible once we decide to ask new questions鈥攁nd learn to look."聽聽聽

Spieler鈥檚 focus on personal narratives also helps readers relate on an emotional level. 鈥淲hen exploring moral abstractions, and technical legal structures," she says, 鈥渋t's best to do that through the prism of individual people's lives.鈥澛�

Spieler鈥檚 second innovation is 鈥渢o show how very marginal people can actually open up a new picture of the way we view Paris.鈥� She points out that 1790 was not only the second year of the French Revolution, but also the apex of the French slave trade. Rather than seeing Paris as divided between pro- and anti-slavery positions, Spieler depicts the city as a place without an abolitionist movement, dependent on slavery and the slave trade, where well-meaning Parisians still tried, and usually failed, to help fugitives.听聽聽

Ultimately, Slaves in Paris portrays a city full of contradictions and tangles of laws, identities, and interactions. 鈥淭he point was not to make strident ideological statements about what Parisians were like, but to show the range of possibilities and texture of these relationships,鈥� she says. The book raises more questions than it answers, which Spieler sees as her job: 鈥渢o open up new fields of inquiry and opportunities for collaboration.鈥� Her next project applies the same biographical lens to the history of abolition in France, this time through the lives of families.听